Lovely Lying Lips

by Valerie Sherwood

  The Daffodil and the Iris...he’d forgotten Old Scoresby had called them that. But as he looked at his lovely daughter, leaping down from her horse in a single fluid motion, with her glorious daffodil yellow hair blowing in the wind, her wide crystal blue eyes clear as the dew and her fragile apple blossom complexion abloom, he could not help thinking that Old Scoresby had been right.

  And was not Constance, he mused, a veritable iris? Hers was a long-stemmed, swaying beauty, and her lustrous cloud of almost blue-black hair surrounded a pale heart-shaped face dominated by enormous dark eyes of a rich velvety purple that could easily be compared to the violet-hued irises that bloomed so lavishly in the gardens of Axeleigh.

  They both had the sparkle and freshness of spring flowers. But the toastmaker, the Squire thought wryly, had entirely overlooked the stubborn challenge of Pamela’s daintily squared jaw and the jaded sophistication of Constance’s shadowed glance. Clifford wanted them both to be happy, but he was not sure that was going to be easily achieved. Pamela, he understood, favored Tom Thornton, but Tom was a reckless chaser as yet, not ready to settle down—and Constance seemed bent on eluding Ned.

  They heard the front door slam behind them as the wind took it; they heard Pamela’s tinkling laugh. Then the two girls swirled into the room from the hall with a swish of velvet skirts and stood there pulling off their gloves, with their cheeks still flushed from the cutting wind outside.

  “Captain Warburton, how nice to see you.” Sixteen-year-old Pamela, self-assured in her position as sole heiress to Axeleigh Hall, stepped forward charmingly to greet her father’s guest.

  But seventeen-year-old Constance, heiress to nothing, hesitated a moment before stepping forward warily to greet the tall Captain, for she had guessed his errand.

  The Captain’s gray eyes kindled as he greeted Constance, struck as always by the feminine aura she radiated. Not true classical beauty perhaps as an artist might paint it, but the illusion of beauty, something compounded of fragility and poise, a sense of drama and an almost overwhelming femininity that held men in thrall.

  “Mistress Constance,” he said affably, making a courtly bow to her that brought his mane of dark hair sweeping almost to the floor. “Did you enjoy your ride?”

  Pamela, when they had first entered and seen the Captain standing beside her father, had thought for a moment that Constance might break and run. For a moment there in the doorway her body had quivered. But now she had quite recovered and she gave him a graceful curtsy.

  “Indeed, sir,” she replied coolly, and the soft rustle of her voice, catching the Captain as it did in the depths of his bow, coursed through him like a flood. For a moment that soft whirring voice brought Margaret back to him, and the current of misery that went through him in that bleak moment made him hold his bow stiffly a moment too long.

  He rose to meet Constance’s level contemptuous gaze.

  “Will ye stay to dinner, Tony?” asked the Squire.

  Captain Warburton, risen from his bow and in control of his thoughts again, gave the dark beauty a regretful look, and explained that he was expected this night at Hawley Grange. This to alert the Squire that he had best be about making arrangements for the betrothal for there were three eligible daughters at Hawley Grange, and a father eager to see them wed!

  The Squire chose not to understand the inference, but when the Captain had left and Pamela chuckled, “There goes a suitor for your hand, Constance!” he corrected her. “Speaking in Ned’s behalf,” he said.

  “I don’t favor Ned’s suit, sir,” said Constance quickly.

  “Father,” said Pamela, going over and giving her father an impulsive hug, “will not force either of us into marriage with anyone we don’t want!”

  Thank God for that, thought Constance bleakly. For I'm apt to be on his hands a long time!

  “Captain Warburton does ride a horse well, doesn’t he?” Pamela’s voice from the window cut into Constance’s unhappy thoughts.

  “Tony Warburton does everything well,” her father told her in some amusement. “And Ned, I don’t doubt, is going to be just like him. Dashing fellows, these Warburtons.”

  “We must change for dinner, Pam.” Hoping they had not noticed how this meeting with Captain Warburton had shaken her, Constance made for the door.

  “It’s beginning to snow,” she heard Pamela say. “Look, it’s coming down very hard!. Someone really should run after Captain Warburton and make him come back—he could get caught in a blizzard and freeze to death, like my Uncle Brandon.”

  The Squire gave his daughter a stricken look and his gaze flitted to Constance. She stood poised in the doorway, her back rigid. She was glad they could not see her face because she wanted nothing so much as to dash heedlessly after Captain Warburton, to clutch at his stirrup if necessary, to clasp her arms around his riding boot and beg him to return.

  But she would not do it!

  She would let the lean Captain ride into a blizzard—or into hell if need be—before she would beg him to come back. And it was not just those marriage vows, taken all those months ago, that were holding her back, but something else—something she refused to face. She choked back a sob and would have run on into the hall but that Pamela cut in breathlessly with, “Oh, look who’s coming down the drive! It’s Tom, and Ned is with him. They’ve stopped to talk—now the Captain has left them with a wave and they’re coming on.” Her voice grew joyous. “We can have them to dinner!”

  The Squire’s face lightened at this glad acceptance of a potential suitor by his daughter but Constance’s face grew stormy. Ned appearing hot on the heels of his brother, sweeping in with all the Warburton dash to claim her for himself! She made a little unconscious gesture of rejection for she was very wary of Ned. She found him attractive—but that was only because he was so like Tony. And she would not be forced into a farce of a betrothal with him!

  Pamela ran to meet them as they came in dusting snow from their clothes. She skimmed over the floor with her slate blue riding skirts pulled up scandalously high about her trim ankles. Her father watched her indulgently. Pamela’s exuberance was as much a part of her as her sunbeam hair and prismlike crystal blue eyes that seemed to reflect all the colors of the rainbow.

  “Tom! Ned!” She greeted them joyously and all but dragged them into the room with her. “Look what we’ve snared for dinner, Father! Guests!”

  The Squire gave them both a smiling greeting. Ned, he noted, looked worried behind that flashing smile. Like his brother, he had the wild Warburton stamp on him. Tom was a golden Viking with a face made for laughter, yet he’d be a good man in a fight. The Squire approved his daughter’s choice.

  With a pounding heart, Constance greeted their guests and tried to bear up under Ned’s dazzling smile.

  “Snow is always lucky for me!” murmured Pamela irrepressibly as she brushed by Constance.

  Snow had not always been lucky for her, thought Constance, remembering the snows of Yorkshire. She had an uneasy feeling this snow would not be lucky for her either.

  Part Two

  The Dangerous Lover

  Bright honor always drove him, most dangerous of men,

  But her soft voice draws him ever back—to take her while he can!

  And his love's a goad on the icy road

  And his burdened heart threatens to explode!

  Can he square it with his conscience? Is he free to love again?

  Axeleigh Hall, Somerset,

  December 22, 1684

  CHAPTER 3

  Having greeted Tom and Ned and given Ned a noncommital answer to the question that loomed in the younger man’s anxious gray eyes. Captain Warburton parted from them with a wave and continued to ride his great charcoal horse Cinder down the driveway toward the gates of Axeleigh. His broad back beneath his wind-whipped cloak was arrow straight as became the excellent rider he was, but his dark head beneath its broad-brimmed plumed hat, which was now being dusted with snowflakes, was sunk in thought and his expr
ession was stern. This was one battle he should have won easily. Ned was charming, attractive, all that a lad of his age should be and he and the Squire were old friends—there should have been no objection to the match.

  But he had bungled it. He told himself bitterly that he had no talent for finding true love—either for himself or anyone else. And that when he did find it, he did not recognize it. Ned would have been well advised to get somebody else to intercede for him.

  A good man in a fight, but otherwise he did not account himself for much, did Tony Warburton.

  His was a checkered past. At thirteen he had run away to sea and been gone three years. While this had the advantage of keeping him away from England during the Great Plague, it had brought him home into the port of London immediately after the Great Fire and he had viewed his country’s capital with some trepidation, seeing it as a charred and smoking city.

  He had arrived back at Warwood at about the time six-year-old Margaret was being sent away to boarding school. For a time he had enjoyed a riotous life as a student at Oxford, but the ivied walls of academe were not for him and at eighteen he had departed Oxford for London and then the Continent, where the English ambassador to France had discovered his keen perception and information-gathering capabilities. In time he had become a focal point in England’s sketchy intelligence network. At heart an idealist—and made cynical by Charles Ⅱ’s shifting policies—he had soured on the Stuarts all and returned to Somerset in time to meet, in the Squire’s drawing room, Margaret Archer back from boarding school.

  One look at her blazing beauty and Tony Warburton was aflame. Forgotten were politics and the fate of kings. He pursued the beautiful Margaret with single-minded devotion and before the week was out he had offered her his heart and his hand.

  But Margaret, just bursting free of the bonds of a strictly run school for young ladies, was of no mind to settle down at once. She was flattered by the attentions of the dashing Captain and indeed assured him blithely that she felt she would eventually choose him from among her admirers—but that did not keep her from flirting with any bright-eyed young fellow who caught her fancy. Captain Warburton, who had loved and left so many women, was led on a wearying chase.

  His temper grew short. Twice he called out suitors who, it seemed to him, had pressed too close for Margaret’s hand—and perhaps received encouragement—and nicked them both with his sword as a rebuke.

  Margaret was delighted. It was very satisfying to have, as proof of her desirability, the clash of steel to prove that men thought she was worth fighting over.

  So at fifteen she became betrothed to the dangerous Captain Warburton.

  At fifteen, in the pulsing magic of first love, she let him kiss her in the garden maze at Axeleigh—and kiss her again. And let his fevered lips slide tingling down her bare throat and bosom, let his warm hands urge down the low-cut neckline of her orange lawn gown and kiss the warm bare flesh below.

  With a little cry she had seemed to melt into his arms—and with that soft impact melted his up-to-now firm resolve not to take her until after the ceremony.

  “Margaret,” he had said in a strangled voice, “we can be seen from the house.”

  “Well, I know where we won’t be seen—where they’ll never even think to look for us!” Her rich laughter lilted and she seized his hand and ducked down, holding her loosened bodice to cover her bared breasts, and led him—for he followed willingly enough in his overheated condition—through the lazy summer air toward the walled private family burial ground.

  “Margaret,” he protested, laughing. "Not a graveyard, surely!”

  “Why not?” She gave him a wicked slanted look from her green eyes. “ ’Tis well overhung by trees and walled and safe from prying eyes—and besides there’s a great blank space that’s all myrtle and smells lovely. Clifford says that he and Brandon and I shall be buried there—but of course I won’t, I’ll be buried at Warwood someday. Beside you.”

  And now both she and Brandon were buried there, he thought bitterly, with moss slowly covering the damp marble of their headstones. Captain Warburton passed a hand over his eyes whenever he thought about it, as if to dispel cobwebs. Or perhaps nightmares. For it still seemed unreal to him that Margaret—so young, so beautiful, so reckless and so infinitely desirable—should be other than vividly wonderfully alive.

  Certainly she had been wonderfully alive at that moment when she had pulled him with her from the garden maze into the walled enclosure and thrown herself down, laughing, into the fragrant blue-flowered myrtle and held out white arms to him, dimmed by the shadows of the overarching oak branches. “Tony,” she had whispered. “Why should wait?”

  Why indeed? Captain Warburton flung off his chivalrous desire to bed his virgin according to the tenets of church and law and flung off his restraint just as he flung off his coat, near tearing the seams as he came out of it.

  From the bed of myrtle a winsome Margaret sat up and began coquettishly arranging and rearranging her skirts, making sure her dainty knees were well displayed. “I don’t know ...” she murmured, pulling off one of the blue myrtle blossoms. “Do you really think it is right?”

  She had said it lightly, tauntingly, to goad him on—and she was not disappointed. Tony Warburton, down now to shirt and trousers, had fallen to the ground beside her and his strong arms—arms that had ached to hold her so—slid protectively around her.

  “Margaret,” he said in that soft rich voice that she had come to love so much, “whatever we do alone together is right.” He kissed her forehead, her hair. “I only waited” —he kissed her cheeks, her soft square jawline—“because I wanted”—his lips found hers, turned sideways, pressed them gently apart, probed within them with a questing tongue that sent showers of feeling bursting through her—“to do what was best for you.” He drew back, looked down gravely into her face. “I wanted to do you honor.”

  It was a simple declaration of love and the fiery girl in his arms responded to it.

  “Oh, Tony, you do me great honor!” Her fingers twined into his hair, caressing the back of his neck, causing him to tense. They slid down his back, roving over his ropy back muscles so that the tension built. “You do me the honor of wanting to marry me!” Those fingers were trying to unbutton his cambric shirt now, so that they might quest inside, rove over the heavy satiny muscles of his chest. “And this—oh, this is best for me, Tony!” It was almost a wail.

  And an invitation.

  Tony Warburton was not one to let such an invitation go by. He swept aside the restraining bodice and chemise that only half covered her round young breasts and burrowed his face with a groan in the white valley between them. With expert fingers—for he had had many paramours and reckless adventures with women, married and unmarried, and had learnt all the clever ways that women’s clothes were fastened together—he now assisted her skirts to ride up over her hips, slid them along gently, as his lips, now worrying one pink crested nipple and now the other, kept her occupied elsewhere.

  So that it was almost with a start that eager young Margaret became suddenly aware that her bare bottom was resting upon a bed of cool damp myrtle in flower and that little grass blades that tried to thrust through the myrtle were tickling between her buttocks.

  And with that sudden awareness came another—that Tony Warburton’s hard masculinity was pressed against her, was—in a sudden thrust that brought a sharp short cry to her lips—claiming her.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, desisting for the moment even as his long body quivered. “Did I hurt you too much, Meg?”

  “No,” said Margaret sturdily. “Only get my skirt down under me, Tony—this grass and myrtle is tickling me monstrously!”

  He laughed exultantly and in what seemed a single strong gesture lifted her up and swept her skirt down beneath her thighs, laid her gently back upon it. “Meg, Meg,” he murmured.

  And with those sighing words began an assault upon her feelings that Margaret to her dying day would n
ever forget.

  All the skill, all the expertise that he had learnt from a hundred women, Tony Warburton now brought to her—and with it all the gentleness, all the warmth of a lover who has found at last the One Woman to satisfy all his dreams.

  Margaret, her senses assaulted on every side, thrilling to his gentle insidious touch, her flesh afire with newfound passion, felt herself swept away and transformed—reborn. No longer girl but woman—woman, tingling, thrilling, triumphant.

  On the wings of his burgeoning passion she felt herself borne up and up. Her body was filled with delightful new explosions of feeling, each more tempestuous, more soul-shattering than the last. Until in a last great burst of wonder her wild spirit seemed to break free and join with his somewhere beyond the treetops.

  Softly, gently, with kisses, he brought her back down with him, down to the flower-scented earth of this secret lair again. “Meg,” he was murmuring against her passion-shivered skin. “Meg, oh, Meg.”

  He naturally presumed she would be willing to have the banns cried that week.

  But he was wrong.

  His spirited fifteen-year-old sweetheart was of no blind to marry just yet. She was enjoying too much having him as a lover!

  And so began a relationship that with any other woman the Captain would have regarded as highly satisfactory. But with Margaret it chafed him, for to him Margaret was—would always be—different. He wanted to claim her before all the world not as a mere betrothed, a tenuous some-day arrangement, but as his wife to have and hold. In his heart the lean Captain had taken a mate, just as the lean gray wolves that roam the forest take their mates—for life. And he wanted Margaret to acknowledge that.

  She did not.

  Steadfastly she refused to have the banns cried. “Not just yet,” she would say, with a witching look at the tall frowning Captain. “The Hamiltons’ house party is next week.” Or “the races at Taunton.” Or somebody’s wedding. Or christening. Or whatever. Always an excuse.